Some embodiments described herein relate generally to distributed switch fabrics, and, in particular, to methods and apparatus for accessing and retrieving information in a distributed switch fabric.
In some known distributed switch fabrics (e.g., a switch fabric within a data center), to debug a target agent (e.g., a packet forwarding engine (PFE) daemon) on a target node (e.g., an access switch) or retrieve information from a target agent on a target node, multiple steps of operations are typically used to reach the target agent on the target node and access the information. In such known distributed switch fabrics, the same operations of the multiple steps are typically repeated to reach and access multiple nodes for debugging or retrieving information. For example, scripts can be used to repeat the same operations of the multiple steps to access and retrieve information from PFE daemons on multiple line cards of multiple nodes in a distributed switch fabric. Such an approach, however, is typically complex, tedious, and difficult to scale for a distributed switch fabric with a large number of nodes.
Accordingly, a need exists for methods and apparatus that can simplify the multiple steps of operations to more efficiently access and retrieve information from multiple nodes of a distributed switch fabric.